Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Leonard Pitts Jr. This is an open letter to my colleagues in the news business. The silence is getting loud. It’s been nearly four months since the scandal broke. Four months since Jack Kelley, star foreign correspondent for USA Today, was found to have lied his way through his professional life for the last 13 years. He lied about where he had been, what he had seen, whom he had talked to, what they had said. He lied so much I’m only half convinced “Jack Kelley” is his rea...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Syndicated columnist Not to trivialize a serious matter, but the hearings of the Sept. 11 commission have begun to remind me of one of Smokey Robinson’s less famous hits. It’s called “Who’s Gonna Take the Blame.” Over the last month, the men and women in the hot seat have spent as much time pointing fingers at one another as they have analyzing the lessons of the terrorist attacks. What should have been a search for facts has instead become an exercise...
Leonard Pitts Jr.: Syndicated columnist I’m not sure Rush Limbaugh is, as the title of the best-selling book would have it, “a big, fat idiot.” The man has, after all, lost a considerable amount of weight in recent years. But he is a major reason I’d rather hammer a spike through my ears than subject them to talk radio. Not because I disagree with his politics, though I doubt he and I could reach consensus on what day of the week it was. What makes Limbaugh an irritan...
Leonard Pitts Jr. I’m not here to beat up on the old guy. Yes, he offended many people. But slapping him around would be beside the point. I’m talking about Paul Hornung, a pro football hall of famer who won the Heisman trophy as a Notre Dame student in 1956. Last week, he offered an opinion of how his alma mater can return to football glory: Lower the school’s academic entrance requirements so more black athletes will be able to get in. “We can’t stay as strict as we are as... Full story
Leonard Pitts Jr. Somehow, for black people, it always comes down to fractions. At the beginning, there was that unpleasantness about the Constitution counting us as three-fifths of a human being. More recently, fractions have been necessary to measure our progress toward equality. So in a sense, the National Urban League’s just-released “State of Black America 2004” report is business as usual. This year’s version of the annual study features a new “equality index,” a...
Leonard Pitts Jr. Are Miami police spying on rap artists? And should it matter to you if they are? How you answer the first question depends on who you choose to believe. According to a recent story by Miami Herald reporters Nicole White and Evelyn McDonnell, police in both Miami and Miami Beach have been routinely tailing and surveilling rap performers who visit South Florida to work and play. This was promptly denied by Miami Police Chief John Timoney. However, the piece...
Leonard Pitts Jr. Let me set the scene. You’re sitting in traffic with your 4-year-old. Suddenly you notice she’s watching with rapt interest something in the next car. You glance over and realize the other vehicle is equipped with one of those DVD screens that are available on certain late-model cars. The option is usually marketed as a way of keeping kids quiet on long road trips. But what the folks over there are watching is more loin king than “Lion King.” Because there o...
Leonard Pitts Jr. A few words about race, justice and Marcus Dixon. Hundreds of people rallied last week in Atlanta, hoping to persuade the Georgia Supreme Court, which is considering an appeal filed on his behalf, to set Dixon free. Meanwhile, he sits in a cell in a Georgia penitentiary, serving a 15-year sentence for statutory rape and aggravated child molestation. Prosecutors say the crime stems from the fact that last year when he was 18, Dixon had sex with a girl who was...
Leonard Pitts Jr. Two plus two — I have this on good authority — equals four. So how do you feel about that? Do you support that interpretation or do you think it should be changed? Yes, I know. You’re wondering if I’ve lost my mind. Well, asking that question tells me something about you. Namely, that you’re not a member of the Bush administration. Because in the administration, how you feel about a fact is often more important than the fact itself. And political expedienc...
Leonard Pitts Jr. It’s just the sort of thing you’d expect from Iran. A woman runs afoul of local religious authorities who are angered by her refusal to cover up. But it isn’t just her immodest style of dress that riles the ayatollahs. They have also heard rumors that she sells sex toys from her home and instructs women in their use. So she is arrested and now faces trial and a possible prison term. It’s all true, except that it didn’t happen in Iran. For all intents a... Full story
Leonard Pitts Jr. It was a week in which the president agreed to an investigation of prewar intelligence failures, a Massachusetts court affirmed gay marriage and ricin was found in a Senate mailroom. So naturally, everybody was talking about Janet Jackson’s right breast. As you surely know, Jackson “unleashed the breast” (credit the phrase to a student of mine) during a Super Bowl halftime duet with Justin Timberlake. As the song ended, Timberlake ripped away Jacks...
Leonard Pitts Jr. You know the guy I mean. Maybe he works two cubicles over, maybe you went to school with him, maybe he’s your brother-in-law. You could call him the guy who’s never wrong, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. He is the guy who never “admits” he’s wrong. The guy who says, “That’s what I said” when the record shows he said something else entirely. The guy who honors only those facts that are convenient, whose memory filters out anything contradicting his...
Leonard Pitts Jr. “Hope I die before I get old.” The quote, of course, is from Pete Townshend of The Who. It’s a lyric from “My Generation,” a song that came out in 1965, the year Townshend turned 20. He was, at that age, a long-haired rock star famous for windmilling his arm and smashing his guitars. Nearly 40 years later, the hair is mostly gone. The rock star has sad poet’s eyes, a trim gray beard and the settled-in look of an English professor. The song notwithstan... Full story
Leonard Pitts Jr. Black people get crappy health care. If this comes as news to you, it’s probably because you haven’t been paying attention. Numerous studies have documented the fact that, regardless of income levels and across a wide range of illnesses, blacks and other minorities have less access to medical treatment and the treatment they do receive is often substandard. You can read about it in Dr. Allen Gifford’s 2002 study of HIV clinical trials, Georgetown Unive... Full story
Leonard Pitts Jr. You knew this was coming. It followed as naturally as broken promises follow elections, the inevitable byproduct of Kobe Bryant’s arrest last summer on charges of raping a 19-year-old hotel worker. She says he forced himself on her, he says the sex was consensual. A jury will decide. But a Los Angeles-based sex therapist says there’s a way to avoid the next case of he-said, she-said altogether. You’ve heard of prenuptial agreements? Well, consider this a pre...
From time to time, columnist Leonard Pitts expresses good ideas. However, his Wednesday column was possibly emotionally appealing to some, but lacking in rationality. The fact something “is” seldom justifies what it “ought” to be. There is corruption in politics, but I strongly deny it ought to be that way. There is immorality in some teen dating, but I deny it ought to be that way. There is inequity in the Federal Tax Code, but I deny it ought to be that way. There is beef fr...
Sometimes, the battle over gay rights reminds me of a science-fiction movie. I’m thinking “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or one of those other golden oldies where humankind is infiltrated by an enemy that looks and sounds like us and is therefore able to hide among us, undetected. That was probably intended as a metaphor for communist agents when “Body Snatchers” came out in 1956, but in 2004, it serves just as well as a metaphor for gay life. As Exhibit A, I refer you to a...
“All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.” — Strom Thurmond So I guess ol’ Strom didn’t mind a little integration after all. Granted, he made opposition to it the cornerstone of a political career that took him to the South Carolina statehouse and the U.S. Senate. True, he ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform. Yes, he staged Am...
Leonard Pitts Jr. An excerpt from the Gospel according to St. Luke, revised and updated for the 21st century: “And there were in the same country shepherds, abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.’ “Wal-Mart is having a sale on DVD players...
Leonard Pitts Jr. The coroner says he called it homicide only because he had no choice. Under Ohio law, he explained, his only other options were to categorize the death as accidental, natural or suicide. None of those, he felt, adequately accounted for how Nathaniel Jones died — i.e., after being beaten with nightsticks wielded by Cincinnati police officers. The officers say they were only seeking to subdue the 41-year-old black man after he began acting strangely — dancing a...
Leonard Pitts Jr. It is spring. I walk into my home office ready to work. My computer is not. It seems to have smoked crack overnight and will not function, despite repeated rebooting, several sharp slaps to the CPU and curses upon the name Bill Gates. I call technical support. Technical support explains that I am in deep waste matter and must reinstall the operating system. This, in turn, will require me to reinstall all my software and hardware. Crying like a baby will not h...
Leonard Pitts Jr. So this president and this football player meet in a bar ... “O.J. Simpson, is that you?” “Yeah, who wants to — George W. Bush? Hey, how you been?” “Real good, Juice. So, what you been up to lately?” “Well, George, I’m still searching for the real killers. If I can bring them to justice, maybe people will ... ” “Man, do you hear yourself? You know perfectly well most people think there was one killer and his initials were O.J. Every time you start with t... Full story
Leonard Pitts Jr. How long do you figure it would take you to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Not trying to set a land speed record, mind you. Just working at a normal pace, slapping jelly on one slice of bread, peanut butter on the other. How long do you figure it would take, start to finish? Thirty seconds? Forty-five? Do you really have that kind of time to waste? PJ Squares is betting that you don’t. So the company, born — it swears! — in Sandwich, Ill., is offer...
Leonard Pitts Jr. I have no problem with what Howard Dean was trying to say. It’s what he actually said that troubles me. Specifically, the Democratic presidential candidate told an Iowa reporter that he wants to be “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.” It was an inarticulate way of saying an important thing: Dean wants to reach out to poor whites in the South. But because he somehow managed to say something else entirely, the former Vermont g...
Leonard Pitts Jr. I guess I’m obligated to be offended by this new board game. After all, Al Sharpton says I should. And not just Rev. Al, either. Many other people — including NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and radio host Tom Joyner — have pronounced themselves offended by the game. Not that I blame them. It’s called Ghettopoly, a take-off on Parker Bros. venerable Monopoly. Except that this game isn’t about moving a car or a top hat around the board, buying propertie...
